CHICAGO, IL – CONGA CONNECT 2018 – April 3, 2018 – Conga, the global leader in Intelligent Document Automation, today announced at its annual user conference, Conga Connect, that the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Counselytics, a leading provider of contract discovery and analytics AI solutions.

The addition of Counselytics will enhance the breadth and depth of Conga’s product portfolio, widely considered the industry’s most comprehensive intelligent document automation suite. The move will broaden Conga’s offerings by allowing customers to instantly convert unstructured contract data to actionable intelligence. It identifies and classifies structured data elements within the unstructured data of contracts to create a faster and more accurate contract review process. This enhanced offering will drive even greater results and value to Conga customers globally through faster and more accurate contract review.

“With Counselytics, we are bringing on top proven experts in artificial intelligence, with 25 years of collective experience in document analytics,” said Conga CEO Matthew J. Schiltz. “Counselytics’ solution furthers our work to deeply instrument the contract process. This will accelerate our customers’ contract lifecycle management adoption and maturation.”

“Teaming up with Conga presents an exciting opportunity for our customers and employees, and will bring the Counselytics product to a much broader audience,” said Counselytics Founder and CEO Jason Gabbard. “Conga’s reputation for stellar customer success, product innovation, global support and complementary expertise in the document and contract management space will allow us to deliver a more complete contract lifecycle experience to our customers.”

With the company’s recent acquisitions, Conga now offers flexible, single-vendor provided, true end-to-end intelligent document automation. The Counselytics agreement is the company’s third acquisition in a month, following the additions of Octiv on March 7 and Orchestrate on March 27. Conga also added a new eSignature solution, Conga Sign, to its suite of data management, document generation, and contract lifecycle management solutions in February. The company also hired two new product executives, Skip Walter and Will Spendlove. Throughout 2018, Conga has continued to drive record-setting growth while underscoring its commitment to providing end-to-end document and contract solutions.

About Counselytics
Counselytics is a leading contract discovery and analytics company founded in 2013 by former Cravath lawyer Jason D. Gabbard, and Cambridge University computer scientist Jana Sukkarieh. Counselytics uses proprietary artificial intelligence technology, to extract data from contracts, bringing unprecedented efficiency to contract management, due diligence and lease abstraction.

About Conga
Conga® developed its suite of enterprise-grade Intelligent Document Automation solutions to help businesses optimize their CRM investments. The Conga Suite, which includes Conga Composer, Conga Contracts, Conga ActionGrid, and Conga Sign, simplifies and automates data, documents, contracts, signing, and reporting.

As a Salesforce Platinum ISV Partner, Conga is committed to providing its customers with enterprise-grade infrastructure, security and solutions. In fact, more than 650,000 users in 85 countries across all industries rely on Conga applications to fully utilize their Salesforce data, including Hilton Worldwide, Schumacher Group, and CBRE.

The company is privately-held and based in Colorado with global operations in the UK and Australia. Learn more at getconga.com or follow Conga on Twitter: @getconga.

NEW YORK, November 28, 2017 — As the North American business model has moved from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based model, it has created a shift in business priorities to the front office. This meant that companies were losing opportunities in this new environment for a reason they’d never seen before. Previously, they were focused on procuring multiple vendor accounts for various parts, machinery, raw materials, and other inventory with a handful of sales or distribution accounts. However, today’s service-based model means that companies are producing technology and services with a large customer base, shifting the emphasis to front office sales, customer service, and contract management.

As such, the importance of customer relationship management tools (such as Salesforce) and customer lifecycle management tools has skyrocketed. However, it is important to understand that, in today’s business ecosystem, it is paramount for not just big businesses but also small and medium-sized businesses to have visibility into their customer contracts.

For most businesses, the organization and management of contracts is an afterthought, particularly during the growth curve. Competing priorities with limited resources means contracts and other documents are stored in a shared or personal drive with some limited organization to serve day-to-day needs. However, having a system to manage not just the files but also the data within them can offer a number of key advantages:

1. Maximize Selling to the Customer
Successful marketing requires reaching out to customers proactively, at the right time, with the right message, and for the right reason. Understanding key metrics such as upcoming expirations, renewal clauses, and pricing benchmarks from within the existing contracts ensures that your sales team is equipped with the right data at the right times.

2. Enhanced Customer Experience
Accenture’s 2013 “Global Consumer Pulse Survey“ reveals that 85% percent of customers become frustrated when dealing with a company that does not make it easy to do business with them, 84% of them are frustrated by companies that promise one thing but deliver something else, and 58% of them are frustrated with inconsistent experiences from channel to channel. Having a robust CLM in place helps the marketer understand customer expectations better and thereby pre-empt customer frustrations. Every satisfied customer generates and saves revenues that may otherwise be required to acquire new customers or coax more purchases out of existing ones.

3. Measure Return on Marketing Interventions
Marketing interventions, especially based on CRM analysis, very often make the difference between the success or failure of a small business. Applying CLM metrics to measure the Return on Investment of the CRM interventions, by measuring CLM before and after such interventions, allows enterprises to gauge the percentage of change, and thereby measure the success or failure of an intervention.

Counselytics has created a proprietary solution called SmartCrawlTM that scans shared drive repositories in Google Drive and Box to create CLM reporting capabilities from the files and data within. Our solution, which is based on state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, is deployed and made available to small and medium-sized businesses to help them unleash the power of their data. Insights that were previously only available to large businesses can be made available to small, growth-based businesses to help them scale and grow effectively.

About Counselytics
Counselytics is a leading contract analytics company founded in 2014. Counselytics uses proprietary artificial intelligence technology to find, analyze, and organize important enterprise documents and to extract critical data points from those documents, bringing unprecedented efficiency to contract management, due diligence, and lease abstraction. The company is backed by the top venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley.

NEW YORK, November 1, 2017 — Counselytics, a leading contract discovery and analytics company, has entered into a partnership with MRI Software, a global leader of real estate software solutions. Through this partnership, Commercial Real Estate organizations that use Counselytics and MRI Software can manage the entire lifecycle of the lease abstraction process from data entry validation to revenue accounting. The solution gives users access to a secure, standardized and mutually supported API framework, allowing for easy data transfer between MRI and Counselytics.

“Many forward-thinking commercial real estate firms have entrusted both MRI Software and Counselytics with their most valuable leasing data,” said Ammar Moiz, Chief Operating Officer for Counselytics. “With this new partnership, we are ensuring the fast and secure integration of this data across both platforms. This integration will deliver value to our clients in two ways. First, by completely eliminating the data entry function into the MRI system. Second, this integration will result in quicker tenant account setups to avoid missed revenue and late billing cycles.”

“We’re excited to add Counselytics to the MRI Partner Connect program,” said Ben Berk, Director of Partner Connect at MRI Software. “MRI clients can access the Counselytics solution through our extensive partner ecosystem and take advantage of enhanced leasing analytics and automation capabilities to manage data more efficiently.”

The Counselytics solution uses artificial intelligence to identify and collate key documents such as leases, investment agreements and other relevant documents within the client’s document infrastructure. Once identified, Counselytics uses its proprietary machine learning solution to analyze and extract data points from these documents such as key dates, rent roll, termination options, and much more. It includes integrated machine learning models that can analyze a lease regardless of format with a high degree of accuracy, which can increase the efficiency of a lease abstraction and provide huge cost savings. In addition, through the use of its technology, Counselytics can abstract over one hundred leases in 24 hours with unprecedented accuracy – a much quicker turnaround than other solutions in the marketplace.

With today’s partnership announcement and key product enhancements, Counselytics delivers another key component within its real estate solution, Lease IntelligenceTM. Although several technologies purport to identify and tag terms within leases, Counselytics is the gold standard within the real estate industry due to its ability to abstract all varieties and formats of leases with very high accuracy. Counselytics works with leading CRE companies to deliver high value through this automation.

About MRI Software MRI Software is a leading provider of innovative real estate software applications and hosted solutions. MRI’s comprehensive and flexible technology platform coupled with an open and connected ecosystem meets the unique needs of real estate businesses—from property-level management and accounting to investment modeling and analytics for the global commercial and residential markets. A pioneer of the real estate software industry, MRI develops lasting client relationships based on nearly five decades of expertise and insight. Through leading solutions and a rich partner ecosystem, MRI liberates real estate companies to elevate their business and gain a competitive edge. For more information, please visit www.mrisoftware.com.

About Counselytics Counselytics is a leading contract discovery and analytics company founded in 2013. Counselytics uses proprietary artificial intelligence technology, to extract data from contracts, bringing unprecedented efficiency to contract management, due diligence and lease abstraction.

Using AI to Optimize Working Capital

At a macro level working capital itself is a juggernaut: In the 2014 US Working Capital Survey, “the top 1,000 US companies have more than $1tn excess cash tied up in working capital, which equates to 6% of the nation’s gross domestic product” and ‘payables’ accounted for over a quarter of this. Working capital is inextricably tied to cash flow, and both are linked back to contracts. Yet many companies fail to make the connection.

Poorly managed cash flow is a primary reason many small companies fail. For larger companies, it remains a challenge and is a key metric for overall financial health. In order to optimize your working capital, a company must understand and optimize contract payment terms.

So how do you manage and optimize payment terms to boost cash flow and working capital?

A procurement software system such as a contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology holds critical information from contracts, such as key payment dates, amounts and contingencies. CLM is a valuable tool for proactive, systematic management of the contract throughout its life and the ebbs and flows of cash flow. Implementing CLM often leads to significant gains in cost savings and efficiency.

CLM also helps to integrate payment terms into the A/P process, ensuring that payments are timely made, including discounts and other factors. The challenge, however, is in migrating legacy contracts into CLM and excerpting key information from legacy paper. Historically, companies would outsource this function to places like India, a slow, inefficient and error-prone proposition, not to mention a significant loss of data control. Fortunately, now the savvy operators have an alternative.

Enter AI

One of the most common applications of AI is to translate large amounts of data into meaningful insights, outputs, and models. At Counselytics, we have built a powerful machine-based data extraction capability that identifies important clauses and terms and also extracts key data points such as payment amounts, discounts, termination terms and interest charges.

When integrated with a CLM, it automatically maps that data to a contract data model, so all terms roll-up to the master agreement for a real-time view and constant visibility into all your entitlements, rights and obligations. Counselytics provides a turn-key solution that recognizes contracts as data, making it easier to organize and analyze contracts in a scalable, efficient and cost effective way.

Our customers are now extracting key data points from their agreements (whether it’s a pdf or word) document into the system. This data can provide businesses with deeper visibility into their terms, risks and obligations. Information that was once just words on a piece of paper is now structured analytical data that can be reported on and benchmarked for future reference. A legacy contract can be uploaded into Counselytics, giving you visibility into business analytics within minutes. Another useful and important feature within Counselytics is the ability to validate data points by clicking through to the exact location within the original document. This feature facilitates manual intervention to correct errors or make necessary adjustments.

Deploying a system such as CLM to better manage your procurement is just a step in the right direction. Ensuring all your legacy and future third party contracts are within the database will provide a holistic view of the procurement landscape and can structure important data such as procurement terms which can have a true bottom-line impact to your organization.

About Counselytics

Counselytics is a leading contract analytics company founded in 2014. Counselytics uses proprietary artificial intelligence technology to find, analyze and organize important enterprise documents and to extract critical data points from those documents, bringing unprecedented efficiency to contract management, due diligence and lease abstraction. The company is backed by the top venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley.

Lease and content management and administration at most large real estate firms is an operational quagmire. In other industries, successful organizations have managed to efficiently triangulate between people, process and technology (PPT) to manage enterprise files and the important data inside of them. Yet sound processes at most CRE firms remain elusive.

Fortunately, technology offers an antidote. In this post, I share some anecdotes from the winding path that is enterprise sales, offer diagnosis for problems pervasive in the industry and leave you with a few takeaways which I hope will help you get your own house in better order.

Into the fray

We recently began discussions with one of the world’s largest office property trusts about their PPT strategy. The company owns some of the most prized, marquee office assets in the world, and employs tens of thousands of highly educated professionals, yet their document analysis and management solutions are emblematic of worst-of-breed. Pulling back the covers on their current processes quickly revealed the issues. Currently, they outsource acquisition diligence to one well-known firm that produces some of the least user-friendly work product I’ve seen. Going from 100 pages of unstructured lease to five pages of unstructured gibberish on a spreadsheet is an attempt to structure the data without actually providing any inherent capabilities of structured data.
Perhaps more detrimental, none of their data is standardized. Herein lies one of the most detrimental flaws we see. Failure to standardize your data, to enforce taxonomies and classification schema, results in tremendous losses in large organizations.

Gartner projects that white-collar workers will spend anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of their time this year managing documents, up from 20 percent of their time in 1997. Similarly, Merrill Lynch estimates that more than 85 percent of all business information exists as unstructured data commonly appearing in e-mails, memos, notes from call centers and support operations, news, user groups, chats, reports, letters, surveys, white papers, marketing material, research, presentations and Web pages.

According to Gartner, white-collar workers will spend anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of their time this year managing documents, up from 20 percent of their time in 1997.

Their lack of standardization is only the beginning. Once our prospect’s assets are on-board, an internal cast of characters – with overflow support from India – re-reads the so-called abstract to extract key data and enter it into MRI. Finally, when the legacy leases roll-off, new leases are papered on their forms and the internal team repeats the process. So, at the end of the day we have:

– Two different vendors, one in the midwest and one in India

– Silos of work, often redundant, without a single source of truth

– Very little data integrity and control

– Predominantly unstructured, unavailable work product

Home-grown, but not a home

Sub-par home-grown tech and siloed infrastructure frequently present themselves in the industry. We pitched – and lost – a diversified, NYC-based outfit earlier this year with a similar host of problems. The executives in that shop took great pride in their home-grown lease administration and document management technology. After two weeks of hearing about their state-of-the-art home-grown lease tech, we got a peek under the hood. What a treat! The tech was built in fits and starts over a decade and it looked every bit the part. Every feature – and I really mean every feature – got a new tab. New functionality needed? Build a new tab. The tool was so antiquated looking it bordered on cool. Think Oregon Trail.

Putting the aesthetics aside, and ignoring the fact that it was so complicated and cumbersome only one person in the firm truly understood how to use it, the system suffers from some severe flaws:

– All data entry is done manually

– Heavy reliance on Accenture

– Very little control over data

– Significant redundancy in manual work

– No intelligence capabilities associated with document management

– Poor data structuring and taxonomy enforcement

– Increased total cost of ownership (TCO) with continuous custom upgrades and enhancements

The firm had the foresight to realize there must be a better way. Unfortunately, their solution for a path forward seemed to rely on some combination of doubling down on Accenture and getting a Box enterprise license. Admittedly, the Box account might offer some relief, but a smarter strategy would be to break down the silos between document management and lease admin with a content intelligence tool – like Counselytics – that could not only add superior intelligence and organization to the document management protocol, but also seamlessly communicate back and forth with the lease admin software, permitting one-click verification of data and also supplanting the costly, error-prone and manual data entry processes.

Same Same

I spent 10 days in Thailand a few years ago and really enjoyed visiting their local markets. Unfortunately, many of the vendors spoke very little English and I often found it difficult to make a selection. On multiple occasions when I asked the vendors to explain to me the difference between two seemingly different products, they would quickly respond “same same”. While I am just dubious as to whether that’s a sound sales strategy in the markets of Thailand, I am absolutely certain that it is a fatally flawed strategy for data analysis and data management.

One of our clients is a large office property trust based in Pennsylvania. The firm has grown quickly to almost 20 million sf. Firms experiencing rocket ship growth typically wind up operating on paper thin technical infrastructure, harking back to their startup days. The upshot is that it’s relatively easy to effect change, as there exist no legacy systems and the hubris that typically accompanies them. So with this particular client, deploying technology was a relatively direct path to immediate ROI. With our solution we are able to seamlessly tie their Sharepoint file repository to their lease management system using our proprietary Sharepoint add-on application. The documents underlying all the important data points serve as the final source of truth, with one-click validation.

We have also have begun to address their data integrity and classification problems. At the outset of the engagement we found that the exact same language in two different documents might be abstracted in completely different ways. One human might reduce a clause to “Tenant to pay PRS”, while another may say “Included in Opex” with a different field for Opex that references 6.92% (the PRS). Certainly, not same, same: Good luck trying to search and cluster with such inapposite information. When data are unstructured, or even worse, non-standardized and unstructured, decision makers are essentially comparing apples to oranges. There’s no consistency in the taxonomies and classification, leading to bad decision-making.

A taxonomy operates like a directory on a PC by providing a convenient, intuitive way to navigate and access information. This means that rather than having to formulate a query and then review the results, the users can instead drill down through the categories and subcategories of the taxonomy until they find the relevant concept or document. The taxonomy can also be used to limit queries to specific categories and sub-categories. One must identify the categories in which each data point may exist. E.g., a field will be either Yes or No; and never maybe. As such, we can organize, query, and manage based on the Yes or the No.

We are in the process of implementing a robust digital transformation with this customer.

This data standardization is important particularly in the CRE industry where documents can have lifespans ranging from a few months to over ten years. As such, the ability to quickly identify terms such as renewal options, penalties or charges quickly can add material efficiency at such scale.

Takeaways; toward a solution

A great deal can be learned from our experiences over the last few months. No large firm will ever perfectly ace PPT, but considerable gains will be achieved with more focus and diligence.

Content intelligence is moving beyond search and document classification into full-fledged applications, like Counselytics. While early applications were largely funded by the intelligence community for its own use, commercial applications are now emerging. In fact, “killer applications” are being developed for nearly every industry in which high volumes of semi-structured documents are created. CRE is no different, and is, in fact, a perfect use case.

In order to implement an effective solution, we suggest, at minimum, the following:

– Unify your due diligence and ordinary course deal flow processes and break down working group and data silos

– Re-use work product. If you cannot reuse your diligence firm’s work product – and if they aren’t giving you structured data sets – fire them

– Vigilantly enforce taxonomies and classification schema in order to combat the massive drain of unstructured data

These killer applications, powered by cutting edge machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies are maturing into an essential CRE technology, comparable to the relational database. The technology comes in several flavors, namely: search, classification and discovery. In most cases, however, firms will want to integrate this technology with one or more of their existing enterprise systems, such as MRI and Salesforce, to derive greater value from the embedded unstructured data.

Mr. Gabbard is Chief Executive Officer of Counselytics Ltd., a NYC-based document intelligence and management company. He is also Chairman of Forefront Law Group and an active angel investor.

About Counselytics

Counselytics brings the power of big data analytics to the universe of enterprise files. We analyze, organize and manage important data inside of documents. Fortune 500 companies, top banks and hedge funds and some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs trust us to facilitate and improve their important business processes. Counselytics is based in New York City, was founded by a former Cravath attorney and a Cambridge computer scientist, and is backed by a world-class group of investors, including Joe Lonsdale’s 8 | Partners, and Gavin Solotar, former Greenhill General Counsel and Wachtell Lipton corporate partner,and former Founders Fund partner Bruce Gibney.